Gallbladder

The Gallbladder meridian (Zu Shao Yang Dan Jing) is one of the twelve principal channels of Chinese medicine, the network along which qi is held to circulate through the body. It is a Yang channel, paired with the Gallbladder, and belongs to the phase of Wood in the five-phase (wu xing) scheme.

Function in the tradition

In the theory of the channels this meridian is concerned with decision and judgement, the yang partner of the Liver. The twelve principal channels are arranged in yin-yang pairs and in a daily cycle through which qi is said to pass from one to the next, and the points along them are those used in acupuncture and related therapies.

The meridian is described here as a concept of traditional Chinese medicine, a system of ideas and practice with a long documented history, rather than as an anatomical structure of Western physiology.

Its Path, and the Daily Cycle

The Gallbladder channel is usually described as the most convoluted of the twelve, zigzagging back and forth several times across the side of the skull from the outer corner of the eye before descending behind the ear, across the shoulder and down the flank and outer leg to the fourth toe, and it carries more points on the head, forty-four along its full length, than any other channel. In the Ziwu Liuzhu timetable, worked out in the Jin and Yuan periods from the older Neijing idea of sequential qi circulation, the Gallbladder governs eleven at night to one in the morning, the midnight hour, paired with the Liver channel that follows it as the Wood phase's two channels.

The Gallbladder channel takes the most eccentric course of the twelve. It begins at the outer corner of the eye, doubles back and forth across the side of the head several times before it has left the skull, then descends the side of the neck, trunk and leg to the fourth toe. With forty four points it is second only to the Bladder in length, and its zigzag on the temple is the single most distinctive shape in the whole channel atlas.

The organ it is named for occupies an odd position in the tradition's own taxonomy. The Gallbladder is counted among the six yang organs, which are described as hollow and as transporting rather than storing, and yet it stores bile, so the classical literature also counts it among the curious organs, a small class of items that fit neither category cleanly.

What the classics say about its function is not digestive at all. The Gallbladder is described as the official of decision and judgement, and the tradition attributes courage and the capacity to commit to a course of action to it. That association survives in ordinary Chinese, where the word for gallbladder does duty for nerve or daring in much the way English uses guts.

The Gallbladder pairs with the Liver in the Wood phase, and its horary period runs from eleven at night to one in the morning. The atlas reports the doctrine and asserts nothing about the organ.